The Coach's Coach

Personal Development for Personal Developers

Alison Hardingham

• Publisher: CIPD - Kogan Page
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9780749482510
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

The Coach's Coach combines the vast experience of the author with that of three successful sports people: Mike Brearley, Adrian Moorhouse, and Brendan Venter. Between them they set out the tools and techniques available to coaches with solid, practical, experience-based advice on how and when to use them. They look at team coaching, executive mentoring, the role of the manager as coach and the tools and techniques that you need to ensure your success. They also advise on what is required from both the coach and coachee to make the process work. Whether you are an experienced coach or just starting out, a specialist consultant or a coaching manager, this book will help you to become better and to enjoy it more. And ultimately, it will help you to help the people you are coaching to improve their performance and achieve the results they set out to achieve. Structured in clear, easy-to-navigate chapters that allow you to hone in on material as required, The Coach's Coach provides all the information you need to help you develop and improve your skill set.

PART ONE

THE COACHEE

Introduction

The whole point of coaching is to help the coachee. Throughout the coaching process, it is the coachee who needs to be at the centre of things. That is one of the characteristics of a coaching relationship that makes it so special. How often do we experience another person’s intention and attention entirely focused on us and our goals? Most of social life is about trades, trade-offs, compromise and negotiation. We find a path that is acceptable to both parties if not ideal for either.

But coaching is one of those special asymmetric relationships (like therapy and the best kinds of teaching) where one individual puts his own preoccupations and needs aside in order better to understand and respond to the preoccupations and needs of another. So it is appropriate that this book should start with the coachee.

01

Starting points

Introduction

In this chapter, we look at what has gone on for the coachee before she even has the first coaching session. What brings people to coaching? What are the ‘best’ starting points (that is, most likely to lead to a successful coaching outcome) and what are the ‘worst’ (most likely to undermine the coaching before it’s even begun)? Coaches need to remember – and the good ones always do – that although for them coaching begins when the meeting takes place, for the coachee it will have already begun.

As James Flaherty (1999) puts it so succinctly and well: ‘People are always and already in the middle of something.’ So coaches must begin by understanding what it is that their coachees are already in the middle of, and by enabling them to understand how the coaching process will fit in the context of their up-and-running worlds.

Coaching: chosen or ‘prescribed’?

The most important thing to understand when someone decides to receive coaching is whether she feels she is doing it freely, because she has chosen to, or whether she feels she has to some extent been ‘forced’ into it. Of course, as so often with issues to do with people, it is the coachee’s perception of choice or coercion that matters more than any objective truth about whether she has chosen freely. In fact, most people will come to the coaching process conscious of a mix of choice and coercion.

Mike Brearley puts it well, drawing on his varied experiences of coaching and being coached: ‘It is a mistake to think that everyone, all the time, wants to change, or wants to learn; or again, is open to learning from me.’ On the one hand, we all want to develop, to become more than we are, and we move towards coaching freely. On the other hand, we should all prefer it if we were naturally competent and successful in every way, without needing any coaching.

So to some extent every coachee is ‘forced into coaching’ by external events or people, which demonstrate the difference between what she wants to be and what she is. For example, I should like to be able to just sit and write this book with no help. But I suspect that the progress of the book and feedback from my editor will lead me to seek coaching from friends, colleagues, and my fellow contributors. So I shall come to that coaching feeling mostly that I have freely chosen it, but also feeling a tinge of doing it ‘against my will’.

Why do coaches need to be concerned with this issue of choice? The point is, coaching is about helping another person achieve their goals. The single most important achievement of any coach is to leave the coachee feeling more confident in, and more committed to, herself (more of this and of how to do it later). Effective coaching produces an increase of will, of self-determination, and of self-belief, in the coachee. So if the coachee feels that entering coaching is itself an act against her will, it will be much harder for the coach to achieve that central outcome. Yet it is important to recognise that some ambivalence about coaching will be there most of the time for all our coachees, and not just at the start of coaching.

So what do we do? We ask permission to coach. That puts the coachee back in charge, and leads her to perceive, rightly, that it is she who will determine what happens as a consequence of coaching. In fact, in every coaching conversation coaches must be concerned with what they have ‘permission’ to do. The more coercion the coachee has felt in coming to coaching, the more carefully a coach will need to ensure that that permission is there and that it continues. But even with coachees who have made pretty much a free choice, the issue of permission is still relevant.

The more coercion the coachee has felt in coming to coaching, the more carefully a coach will need to ensure that that permission is there and that it continues.

Towards one end of the choice spectrum from the example of me and my writing would be someone (and I have known many) who has had coaching ‘recommended’ to them as something that will enhance their promotion prospects. Right at the other end of the spectrum are those (and I have known one or two) who have been told to have coaching as part of a disciplinary procedure. That is pretty much total coercion.

Where there is a significant amount of coercion (either real or perceived by the coachee) then coaching itself cannot begin, and even if begun, cannot continue, without explicit permission-seeking by the coach. While it is fine to meet with someone to discuss coaching even if they have been ‘told’ to meet you, it is a waste of time, and disrespectful, to coach without the coachee wanting it.

So before anything else, the coach will need to find out from the coachee why he is there and explore whether there is something the coachee wants him to help with. This may take some time, and the most useful question for the coach in this process is ‘Is there some way I can help you here?’ Initially, the answer may be a more or less truculent ‘I don’t know – I don’t have an idea of what you do’.

Then the coach will need to describe the sorts of things he might do, and that will lead to further discussion. Until the coach hears the coachee say, with conviction rather than compliance, ‘Well, I should find it helpful if you/we …’ the coaching hasn’t yet reached a good starting point.

I have known this process of permission-seeking to take hours and span more than one session. Of course, there is value in the permission-seeking process itself, because it is helping the coachee become clear about what she feels and wants, which is in itself an important part of coaching. Sometimes the coach will do the coachee a great service when he realises that he wants neither coaching nor the consequence being held out as a ‘reward’ for coaching.

For example, I remember a lawyer to whom it was suggested she should seek coaching to prepare herself for the possibility of a managing partner role. I spent a couple of hours with her, at the end of which she concluded that she wanted that role ‘on her own terms’ or not at all; she did not want any coaching.

Even in cases of ‘total coercion’, coaching may still be very effective, if the permission-seeking is done properly. In fact, sometimes coaching that has such apparently inauspicious beginnings turns out to be the most productive of all, because coach and coachee are forced from the outset to acknowledge the coachee’s reluctance to change and to plan together what to do about that reluctance.

I remember a banker who had ‘failed’ a promotion board and in consequence been given a series of coaching sessions with me. Had we begun without proper permission-seeking, we would have focused immediately on the areas the board had identified as ‘weak’: people management and relationship-building with his peers. But during the course of our permission-seeking conversation, he expressed his view: that the board had been badly run and that in any case his excellent track record showed he was in fact fully competent on every dimension the board was supposed to assess. He didn’t see what coaching could do for him.

We spent a session or two talking about all this, and he ended up deciding that he wanted to try for promotion again the following year. He asked that our coaching focus on how he could make as sure as possible that he would ‘pass’ next time. Not only did he indeed pass the following year, but as the coaching unfolded he became increasingly interested in improving his general management skills and sorting out some work relationships that had been problematic for some time.

If this banker had been plunged straight into a coaching agenda he didn’t agree with, he would have been trapped. If he had stuck to his self-belief (that he didn’t need coaching), he wouldn’t have been able to take advantage of the coaching and develop. If he had responded to coaching, his confidence in his own understanding of himself would have been damaged. The permission-seeking process enabled him to find his own way to make sense of and use the coaching opportunity; it allowed him to develop and to keep his self-respect.

Mike Brearley adds to this central point about permission-seeking. He has found that timing is often critical. He tells a story from his own experience when too much coaching was given at the wrong time.

‘I was a poor golfer. I once went round with Ted Dexter and two others. I did really well for half a round, until Ted started coaching me. I have no doubt that what he said was right. But the timing wasn’t, and I was rapidly hooking and slicing to an alarming degree. …

‘I remembered this experience when, as captain of England on tour in Pakistan, I questioned Ken Barrington’s attempt to coach the Somerset opening batsman, Brian Rose, into a different kind of grip and backlift.

‘I was very aware of how few Brian’s chances were likely to be, and how radical the coaching advice sounded. He had after all got to where he was with his closed backlift, and trying to change it in the limelight and the short term of a tour was, I thought, asking for trouble.’

So there will be times when a coachee is ready for coaching, and times when she is not. Also, there will be times when she is ready for ‘radical’ coaching, and times when that is the last thing she needs or wants. We need to be sensitive to all of this when we are seeking permission to coach, and, as Mike Brearley puts it, we need as coaches to ‘stay with the person, be willing to get stuck in over time’.

One final point on this issue of whether the coachee has truly chosen to be coached. You won’t know until you talk with the coachee herself. I can’t count the number of times I have been told by someone’s boss that so-and-so is ‘delighted’ at the prospect of coaching, only to discover that so-and-so is confused about what coaching means and a bit put out at the implication she needs to improve!

An informed choice?

Coachees vary greatly in terms of how much they know about coaching. And there are two relevant aspects to knowledge here. One is general knowledge about what coaching is, what its goals and possibilities are, and ...